I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.
Vincent Van Gogh
I am going to try to spend much less time on exposing what I consider to be the crimes of our wealth-dominated Mother Earth. It is starting to take over way too much of my life and is having no noticeable effect other than to piss off the majority of those close to me.
I will be able to spend much more of my time time on family, musical performance, visiting the sick and imprisoned, reading and tai chi.
But, before metamorphosis takes over, I offer this short, mostly visual, piece on some research on how Syria has been changed and destabilized by foreign powers in the last ten years.
I observed something Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said a couple of days ago that the US is involved militarily in about 30% of Syria and didn’t quite know what to think. Thirty per cent seemed much higher than what I’d thought, given all the news about progress, so I searched the web for Kurdish-controlled territory because I knew the Kurds – bless their repeatedly-betrayed hearts – had taken over new territory as far as the Euphrates. My search eventually found these three maps:
1. Top map is 2 months ago. The US is intimately connected to Kurdish YPG and probably anti-Assad rebels and their famous UK/US funded White Helmets Acting Company.
Compare Kurd-controlled territory in 2008 with now. I found two ~2008 maps that seem to agree.
Map 2 – 2008 – Encyclopaedia Britannica
Map 3 – Another source showing essentially the same situation as Map 2
Syria, under crippling sanctions, is a patchwork quilt of displacement and extreme suffering, but at least the pockets of insurgence are now smaller and contained.
And what does Syria do when the terrorists surrender in an area like Douma, which was regularly firing shit into Damascus? They collect these surrendered and their families, feed them, put them on buses and send them to other towns where they can make new friends and plot with old ones.
What a mug’s game that is. If Russia leaves, the place will be chaos.
Iraq lost 500 000 children in the decade before Bush II’s war due simply to murderous sanctions that prevented Iraq from importing medicines and water purification chemicals and water plant maintenance equipment. Syria is under the same type of sanctions now and last week’s missile destruction of the Barzeh Scientific Research Facility near Damascus will reduce Syria’s ability to make medicines, not chemical weapons. Staff were recently interviewed standing amongst the rubble. This would have been impossible if the plants contained toxins.
Simply put, what chance does Western style liberal “Democracy” (struggling or unsatisfying almost everywhere, even in the “easy” places, it seems) have to keep Syria stable? My wild-assed guess is… none at the moment.
But then, since 1949, Syria hasn’t been left alone to try….
Now back to my Lojong…
mightyturk 